Rural America's Future Is Riding on a Cell Signal

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Rural America's Future Is Riding on a Cell Signal

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Until recently, if you happened to have a medical emergency while driving through Townshend, Vermont, a hamlet of just more than 1,000 people in the southern, rural area of the state, it would do no good to pull out your iPhone. You would have no signal. "The irony was not lost on us that someone next door to the hospital couldn't dial 911 on their cell phone," says Roger Allbee, CEO of the local hospital, Grace Cottage.

It’s the kind of problem that Vanu Bose, the founder of the small cell network provider CoverageCo, has been trying to solve with a new, ultra-energy-efficient mobile technology. Bose chose two places to pilot this tech: Vermont and Rwanda. “We picked these two locations because we knew they would be challenging in terrain and population density,” he says. “What we didn’t expect was that many of the problems were the same in Rwanda and Vermont—and in fact the rollout has been much easier in Africa.”

I live with my family on the small farmstead where I was raised in rural Vermont. I went off to college and then returned. I got elected at 22 to the state legislature, helped grow a local software company that served commercial printers worldwide, and spent nearly a decade working for Google from an old bread factory building in White River Junction, just 10 minutes’ drive from where we raise sheep, chickens, and blueberries. Lately, we’ve been restoring 200-year-old barns to house our livestock and tractor. We never miss the Tunbridge World’s Fair, where five-year-olds expertly handle cattle and grandmothers hope their jams and jellies will win blue ribbons. My kids know how to move sheep from one pasture to another and bottle feed baby lambs, and my 12-year-old is already better with the bucket loader than I am.

I’m proof that a rural lifestyle doesn't have to have to exist in opposition to the tech boom that is reshaping vast regions of our country. But for people in rural areas to benefit from the opportunities of the tech revolution, places like Vermont need to be better connected.

For most of my career, I’ve focused on rural economic development. The issues of basic infrastructure—the things many take for granted, such as internet service, public transportation of any kind, and cell phone coverage—have always been a challenge in small-town America, where there are fewer people, those people are more spread out, and there’s a lot less money.

Historically, public-private partnerships have been critical to ensuring economic success in rural areas. In the late 19th century, the government piloted a program called Rural Free Delivery, which delivered mail to farmers and others who lived outside cities. Before RFD, people had to travel a day or longer to pick up their mail, or pay a private service to deliver it. The Rural Electrification Act, which provided federal loans to companies to power rural areas, and the Eisenhower Interstate System, which financed early construction of the highways, were similarly critical to providing connectivity that allowed economic vitality across a vast majority of the land mass of the country. The broadband initiatives of the Obama Administration, although relatively smaller in scale, hoped to achieve the same result.

Here’s where I tell you clearly that I’m an advisor to CoverageCo. The company hired me in January as a consultant to address some of the challenges it was facing as it tried to figure out a business model and deployment strategy in Vermont. I had left Google and loved the technology challenge. Even more important, I wanted to help make sure the kind of communication tools that most people take for granted and that all employers expect of their employees will finally become a reality in Vermont, and other hard-to-reach rural areas.

CoverageCo has designed a small device that can be mounted on any utility pole or building to deliver service to a phone, for any carrier that participates. So, carriers don’t need to build expensive and massive cell towers for you to make a call. The company has received federal and state funding to support the capital costs of deploying this network, but it ran into unexpected challenges. For one, the company needed to install a new meter for each device, and that meter costs many times the cost of the electricity used to power it. The company also discovered that the DSL backhaul, the available broadband that allows the cell service to connect, is constantly interrupted, causing the radios to reboot and drop calls. And then there’s the challenge of providing the 911 service itself: The cost for the vendor that provides the emergency connections is fixed, regardless of whether that connection serves 1,000 people living on a Manhattan block or the two people that may connect to it on a Townshend country road.

Grace Cottage Hospital in Townshend, Vermont.

Courtesy of Grace Cottage Hospital.

What’s more, AT&T, the largest carrier in the state, has chosen not to participate in the network, leading to lower revenues. Also, 2G connections make data services limited, although as many will tell you, it is better than not getting a connection at all.

The company is finding many creative fixes for these challenges. Organizations such as Grace Cottage Hospital and Sterling College are hosting the devices on their buildings and plugging into their existing electrical outlet and broadband connections, dramatically reducing the operational costs for the service. This is a collaborative approach, classically rural: working together to create a community benefit. The company is also using point-to-point wireless tools that allow multiple radios along a corridor to use the same internet connection at one end of a road where high speed cable connections happen to be available.

These are problems that can be fixed if the company has the capital it needs to invest in development. And CoverageCo is now in a position where it can upgrade its devices to provide 4G connections. But it must now raise more money from investors to continue.

It’s critical for the economic future of rural America that CoverageCo and companies like it succeed. In the wake of the Trump election, there has been new focus on the struggles of rural America. While urban areas have bounced back well above their pre-recession economic performance levels, non-metro areas have barely risen above the bottom of the trough on a graph of economic indicators. In the last few years, rural areas have seen the first net loss of population in over half a century, and the population that is left is rapidly aging. Higher education attainment is well below the national average in rural communities, and the heroin epidemic is disproportionately hitting rural areas: 75 percent of heroin addicts are in non-metro communities.

Advancements in technology may well have accelerated some of this rural struggle. Long before Google's driverless car made headlines, self-driving tractors were being deployed across farms. Drones have replaced the crop spraying workforce. At any given time, some of the milk consumed on either coast did not have a human involved in the process, as robotic milking parlors have replaced labor at large farms across the country. Extractive industries, particularly coal mining, have been quickly switching from man to machine over the last two decades.

Traditionally, manufacturing was located in rural areas to take advantage of a less expensive workforce and land, as well as proximity to accessible freight transportation. Innovation came out of these rural production centers at a rapid rate—Vermont can boast the inventor of the first internal combustion engine, and my region was the innovation capital for machine tools for a century—but globalization hit these areas hard. When only one or two companies dominate an area's employment base, the offshoring of these operations can have a devastating effect.

Meanwhile, as cities have become safer and held the promise of more and better jobs, younger people flocked to them. But the economic pressure for city dwellers is enormous. The price of housing is skyrocketing in most metro areas, and public transportation investment is definitely not keeping up with increasingly congested highways as sprawling suburbs try to keep up with housing demands. For some, the quality of life afforded by rural living, particularly for young families, is a strong attraction—especially with the prospect of good public schools.

This can be an opportunity for rural regions like Vermont, where housing is affordable and labor costs are relatively low—if there are jobs. And if employers are interested in providing them. Faced with international economic pressures manufacturers and the demand for short-run, custom products are bringing some types of work back to the United States and looking to rural areas where the cost of development is cheaper and transportation infrastructure is easier to access. IT companies are discovering a wealth of talent in non-metro areas. They find workers are willing to work for less because they value a rural lifestyle and the existence of quality public education.

But as in other geographic and economic transition periods in our history, this rebalancing of economies across our country cannot be realized without communication infrastructure and the intentional use of resources to make it happen. Broadband and cell service are critical to ensuring we bring back economic balance across the geography of our nation.

For Vermont residents, CoverageCo is working—so far, anyway. Over 145 micro-cell devices have been deployed, providing service for any participating carrier over 300 square miles. So far, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon have signed on. As a result, nearly a thousand 911 calls have been completed over the network, all in locations where the call would not have gone through otherwise. And people are able to depend on their phones to communicate.

However, as Bose has started to reach out to investors to fund expansion of his network in his demonstration areas and beyond, an irony has emerged. “Finding US investors to expand rural cell service in Rwanda has been easy,” he says. “Yet for Vermont, literally in the backyard of some the largest pockets of investment wealth in world, we have struggled to get interest.” Impact investors from rural areas understand that Africa has high need and significant opportunity for growth. It doesn’t occur to them that the same kind of need—and opportunity—exist much closer to home.

We're relying on tech to produce the jobs that will replace or reinvent dying industries, and we're crossing our fingers that entrepreneurs around the country will spread those opportunities beyond the coastal hubs. There’s real opportunity in Vermont and in the rest of rural America, but it's never going to happen without basic connectivity.